1/25/2006 @ 6:00AM

Tapping Into The Blogosphere

To increase visibility for the beta version of his jobs-search engine, Paul Forster decided to contact influential bloggers, including John Battelle, the blogger behind Searchblog and author of The Search. Battelle wrote a post on the new company, which was then read by a venture capitalist.

Since then, blog outreach has been a critical part of Indeed.com’s marketing strategy. The company has leveraged blogs to soft-launch new tools and services. Techcrunch, another technology blog, was one of the first to post about the company’s “Jobs by Instant Message,” and Micropersuasion, a popular public-relations blog, published examples of the “Job Trends tool.”

According to Dan Burstein, the author of BLOG! and a venture capitalist at Millennium Technology Ventures, there are more than 50 million blogs worldwide. “Blogs are a concrete new form of media and communications, as well as a new business opportunity,” said Burstein. “Over the next few years, businesses will figure out how to use blogs to develop whole new relationships between businesses and their customers and partners.”

Here’s how your company can tap into the blogosphere.

Track And Publish Blogs

A chance meeting three years ago between Salim Ismail and Bob Wyman resulted in PubSub. Wyman is the tech brains, while Ismail is the business guy. They built a matching engine that processes about 3 million newly published blog posts per day from more than 21 million sources.

Tracking tools like PubSub allow companies to monitor what’s being said about them, their products, their competitors and other topics of importance. The tools include a tracker that looks at the top 1% of bloggers. “Companies should set up ‘subscriptions’ for keywords and phrases relevant to them,” said Wyman.

It is also important to track links to your blog from companies like
Dell
and
Apple Computer
.

“To get noticed by bloggers, companies should appoint internal bloggers and start them blogging,” said Wyman. “Of course, the blogs must be authentic. Also, companies can sponsor blogging events and meet the bloggers themselves to see what makes them tick.”

Shel Israel, the co-author of Naked Conversations, agrees. “We see Microsoft and Sun–with well over 1,000 bloggers each–moving the perception needle into the positive column,” said Israel. “Other companies, like Google and Apple, have cultures that seem to an outsider to discourage open, transparent dialogue with customers, users and prospects. This is impacting how people perceive these companies. We see a day when companies will be regarded suspiciously because their employees do not blog.”

Provide Real News

Influential bloggers tend to specialize on narrow topics. To get their attention, you need to provide them with stories that have not already hit the mainstream media. This has been a big part of the success for the Sunbelt Blog. The blogger, Alex Eckelberry, is the president of Sunbelt Software, a provider of antispyware, antispam and security software. No doubt this is a crowded market, and Eckelberry wanted to find ways to give his firm more visibility.

So he set up a blog on security. It was not a means to promote his products. Rather, he wanted to provide useful information for the security community. He broke several major industry stories, including a massive identity-theft ring and a critical WMF Windows error that has since been fixed by Microsoft.

As a result, other bloggers have linked to Sunbelt, such as DSL Report, Brian Krebs of the The Washington Post and Suzi Turner of CNET. Interestingly enough, CNET named his blog as one of the top 100.

Advertise On Blogs

For the most part, blogs make little or no money. Consequently, if you advertise on one, it is likely to provide good exposure–and will probably be very cost-effective.

Thats what Sonos has done. In early 2005, the company launched its first product, the Sonos Digital Music System. The customer-growth rate was about 4% per week. In all, the company sold more than 50,000 components in 2005 after advertising on such blogs as Endgadget and Gizomodo.

“They have small audiences in comparison with other vehicles,” said Tom Cullen, co-founder of Sonos. “But it is very easy to saturate them and reach a larger percentage of our target audiences. Engadget, Gizmodo, Gigaom and various RSS-feed sponsorships on blogs, via Google, were the key direct-marketing activities for the company last year.”

Use Blogs As Customer Service

As is the case with any digital product, the Sonos Digital Music System is not perfect. Thus, Sonos has an internal team that monitors blogs for customers that report their experiences. If a blog posts a personal review of the product and there is a problem that needs to be fixed, Sonos will post the fix on the comment section of the blog.

“Our customer support department doesn’t just wait for a phone call or an e-mail to provide assistance,” said Cullen. “We believe strongly in word-of-mouth as a key driver to our business. And since blogs are very popular and key in reaching our target audience, these various strategies are one of the key drivers of the success we have had to date.”

Join The Conversations In The Blogosphere

F5 Networks
is a provider of application traffic-management products. What’s that? Well, it’s complex stuff. Actually, F5 has been trying to find ways to simplify its message to the marketplace. Participating in the blogosphere has been a big help.

Joe Pruitt, the senior architect at F5 Networks, reads influential blogs on a daily basis (he currently tracks about 80). “I’ll find places where people are confronting issues that our products can assist with,” said Pruitt. “I can then feedback the specific features in our products that can help with whatever problems they are having. This has led to users starting to think about the issues they face in different ways than they normally would have.”

When reaching out to blogs, it’s important to do it as a conversation. “Blogs are all about open conversation and an attitude focused on accelerating the delivery of information in a more informal manner,” said Jeff Browning, director of product management at F5. “But all too often, words like ‘leverage’ and ‘integrated’ and ‘synergy’ replace the words real people use in candid, natural conversation. There is no ivory tower, so to speak.”

This process can take time, but it is worth it. “Most software developers and architects no longer read the Web–they read new blog posts via their RSS reader that consumes blogs,” said Browning. “So getting into the conversations, which are happening more and more via blogs, is really important among our core-user communities and audiences.”

Tom Taulli operates VetTheDeal.com, a resource for investors and entrepreneurs. He is also an adjunct professor at University of Southern California, teaching corporate finance and corporate law. He has written several books, including The Complete M&A Handbook (Random House) and Tapping Into Wireless (McGraw-Hill). He can be reached at tom@taulli.com and has a blog at Taulli.com.